Photo: Rebecca Noble / Getty Images News / Getty Images
It’s not really about Charlie Kirk. It’s about good versus evil. It always has been, and it always will be.
“If the world hate you,” Jesus said, “know that it hated me before it hated you.”
And maybe more precisely, it hates you because it hates him. We saw that with Saint Stephen, and we saw it with Charlie Kirk. When you speak divine truth to the powers of darkness, the cost can be very high.
When you testify of Christ to a wicked world, the response can be vicious. We saw that with the pulling of a trigger in Utah, and the posting of comments across the Internet. There is a demonic rage which has come to reside in American politics, and it battles against truth and divinity.
Charlie Kirk was a man of strength, but he was just a man, and sometimes he was right and sometimes he was wrong. But he was unwavering in his profession of faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.
Just as you are, or aspire to be.
And as a follower of Christ, you must decide how to react to Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom and how to live in its aftermath. Fortunately, it seems that the Lord himself tells us how.
“I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you,” Jesus said, “and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”
The gospel of Jesus Christ has as its second great commandment the requirement to love our neighbors as ourselves, and followers of Christ are commanded to forgive, “until 70 times seven.” Love and forgive. Those are the guidelines for dealing with all people at all times. Including in times of upset, anger and fear. We are at war with the forces of darkness, but the only thing that overcomes evil is good, and to return evil for evil is to submit to evil.
It is Christ who calls us to love our opponents, and the devil who wants us to detest them. The devil wants us to join them in hell, Christ wants us to invite them to heaven. Evil makes them a hated class, good reminds us that one of the men who celebrated the killing of Stephen became the Apostle Paul.
And in seeing the flaws of our opponents, we must not be blind to our own. Jesus told his followers that before they could remover the mote from their brother’s eye they must remover the beam from their own.
You must fight the Lord’s battles the Lord’s way.
When Peter drew the sword to protect the Savior, Jesus told him to put it away and healed the man whom Peter had wounded. And the next day, as the Lord hung on the cross, savagely beaten and now excruciatingly impaled, about to leave this life, the weight of his body suspended by nails in his hands and feet, among his last words were a prayer to our Father on behalf of those who were killing him, “Lord, forgive them.”
We may sorrow, but we may not rage, and we must not quit.
And we must not allow a spirit of retaliation to creep up in us, or in our society. The Lord’s way is to treat people the way we want to be treated. The devil’s way is to treat people the way they treat us. One path leads upward, the other path leads downward. One path has us making our own moral decisions, the other has us surrendering our free will to the wickedness of others. We must resist the temptation to return evil for evil, and if we fail to resist that temptation, we will have laid down the cross and slipped into the devil’s camp.
But still we go forward, taking upon us the name of Christ, always remembering him, and keeping his commandments, as well as imperfect, mortal beings can, getting back up when we fall, recognizing our error and repenting of it, enduring to the end, whenever and however that might come.
“I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves,” Jesus said. “be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
And remember that persecution, which broadly targets Christians in American society, is as timeless as faith, is the heritage of the believer, and is no cause to be downcast.
“Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you,” Jesus said. “Rejoice and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”
You can’t fight for Jesus with a clenched fist, and you can’t serve the God of love with hate in your heart. But meekness is not weakness, and nothing is more courageous than faith, and there’s a reason we are called Christian warriors.
“Be strong and of a good courage,” Joshua was told, “be not afraid, neither be dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.”
And never forget how it ends.
It ends in glory, with Christ victorious, no matter how many difficult days lie ahead.